Tuesday, 26 September 2017

I've spent the week slowly reading Grady Hendrix's wonderful non-fiction book, 'Paperbacks from Hell.' Anyone who knows me and my wide and varied reading tastes will know that I have huge soft spot for really schlocky paperback horror. This book delves into the ghastly 70s and 80s and brings out some astonishing gems. I now want to spend the Hallowe'en season reading about killer mutant sharks and towns filled with clowns, evil incestuous skeletons, bigfeet, serial killing aliens and jellyfish from hell. The whole book is a lurid, wittily-written and fabulously illustrated tribute to that most idiotically lovable genre, horror.

'One of the reasons I love graphic novels is that they feel like someone has taken hold of a conventional novel and given it a bloody good shake. All the redundant words and phrases and padding and fluff and – especially – all the descriptions have simply fallen out. Leaving lots of lovely empty space.

Thursday, 7 September 2017

i love going through out sketchbooks. These drawings are all from exactly two years ago... when Bernard Socks was called in to pose for some cartoons. I've realised I like these scratchy early versions better than the eventual finished things...!

Sunday, 3 September 2017

Friday, 1 September 2017

Something I was determined to do while we
were on holiday in Paris was make a small pilgrimage to the Rue Broca, where
Pierre Gripari lived and wrote his wonderful fairy tales. Earlier in the
summer, you may remember, I happened upon ‘The Witch in the Broom Cupboard’, a
splendidly anarchic collection of tales from the 1960s, but only recently
published in the UK by Pushkin Press. I adored these stories (as you’ll gather
from my review – here) and one of the things that made me very happy was
learning that Gripari had sat in a café in a small, shabby, tucked-away street,
and took all his best ideas from the kids who hung around the café owned by
Papa Sayeed. That’s how his stories are all so authentically odd – with their
talking guitars and potatoes, rubber jewels and strange witches.

I loved discovering that Rue Broca is only
a matter of steps away from Rue Mouffetard and Place de la Contrascarpe (more
or less the setting of Puccini’s La Boheme) – places very much on our itinerary
when we go to Paris. Rue Mouffetard slopes down from the university and the
Latin Quarter, down to the mosque and the Natural History Museum (with its
crazy stuffed animal parade…) and its gorgeous botanical gardens. Rue
Mouffetard jostles with fruit shops and bistros and toyshops and, on certain
Sundays, there is a band and a swarm of dancers in the market place. It’s just
the kind of eccentric spot you could imagine Pierre Gripari setting down his
stories.

Well, when we visited, I was chuffed to see
that the bookshop halfway up the hill featured a copy of his book, along with a
witch doll. This made me think of the line in his afterword about how no one on
the Rue Broca believed M. Pierre was really a writer, for no one had ever seen
his books in the book shop. Writers always obsess about finding their
own books in shops…

We wandered about and eventually found our
way off the beaten track. Gripari’s own directions are quite complicated, since
he starts whiffling on about rifts in the time/space continuum… as a way of
explaining how you have to go through an underpass…

But soon we found our way to Rue Broca and,
eventually, number 69 and the café. It’s still there. It’s a greasy spoon now.
It was deserted and the boy at the counter told us that we could only have
fruit juice. There was no more coffee: ‘Coffee is finished.’

We sat in the doorway (with Panda, of
course) and thought about Gripari and those kids bustling round him, shoving in
and shouting their ideas at him. The mansion blocks are squeezed together.
We’re in a strange kind of dell, with more respectable streets rising high
above the underpass. This is a hidden little enclave. It makes me think of
Gripari as a kind of urban Hans Christian Andersen: his world a somewhat
grubbier one, and a more multi-cultural one. I read some of the afterword aloud
to Jeremy, telling the tale of how M. Pierre ran out of formal fairy tales and
was forced to create new ones, from the strands of stories that the children
ravelled up for him. It was sunny and we drank juice and then we wandered off,
and found the famous Paris mosque, where we sat in the busy courtyard and
sipped hot mint tea from orange glasses and scoffed baklava stiff with honey.

I never really go on writerly pilgrimages.
They’re usually so commercial and overdone. Wordsworth and the Brontes and all
that gang. I wondered if anyone had ever visited Pierre Gripari’s home and
local café yet? It’s just over fifty years since he was down the Rue Broca, and
becoming famous because of the stories he wrote there. Maybe there should be a
plaque? Or a little sign beside the broom cupboard with a warning about the
witch..?